Build
How Kune Books Without a Booking Platform
18 July 2026 · 6 min read
Kune Bikes & Shuttles runs shuttle transfers up the Ohakune Mountain Road and rents bikes on the Old Coach Road — one of the most-ridden tracks in New Zealand. The operation runs seasonally, weather-dependent, often packed. Before we built our own system, that meant a booking platform in the middle of every transaction, taking its cut, holding the customer relationship, and handing back just enough data to feel like you knew what was happening.
We built our own. Here's what it actually does.
Real-time availability
Customers pick their date and see exactly what's available — shuttle times, bike sizes, add-ons. Availability is live, directly from the database. No manual synchronisation. No double-bookings. No "contact us to confirm."
Instant confirmation
The moment a booking is paid, a confirmation email lands in the customer's inbox. It includes everything — ride details, location, what to bring, how to contact us. It comes from our domain, with our branding. There's no third-party platform in the chain.
Stripe direct
Payments go straight to our Stripe account. No booking platform sitting in between, holding funds, batching payouts, or adding platform fees. The customer pays us; we get paid. The fee is Stripe's standard processing rate and nothing else.
Customer portal
Customers can view and manage their own bookings. Rescheduling, checking ride details, retrieving confirmation — all self-serve. Our team spends less time on the phone answering questions that the system already answered.
No-show tracking and automated follow-up
When a ride is completed, the system knows. No-shows are flagged automatically. After a completed ride, a Google review request goes out at the right time — not immediately, not weeks later. Just when someone is most likely to leave a genuine review.
The ops dashboard
Every booking, every status, every customer note — one screen. Tomorrow's rides. This week's revenue. Outstanding balances. The operator sees the whole picture without opening a spreadsheet.
The result: thousands of bookings a season, handled without a platform taking a cut, without our customer list living on someone else's server, and without any of the limitations that come with fitting your operation into someone else's product.
When the season is over, every record is still ours. Every customer who's ridden with us is in our database. When we want to reach them next season, we can — directly, from our own system, on our own terms.